Pay telephones are common in the prior art. With the recent advent of multimedia, it is desirable to vend multimedia services at a multimedia services terminal, much in a similar way to the way in the which public pay phone services are provided.
With the advent of new payment methods including credit cards, debit cards and the like, it is desirable that users be able to pay for services rendered by a public terminal using any one of the available payment options. Requesting a user to initiate payment multiple times during a session is not acceptable. It would be desirable therefore to provide a method of paying once for unlimited service usage during a session.
Generally, public terminals charge a user either a set fee or charge by the minute, irrespective of the response of the terminal as seen by the user. Delays in such responses may be due to delays in receiving data from a network and it is not acceptable to expect a user to pay for delays or resource problems experienced by the network. Rather, the user should only be charged for actual, legitimate transfers of data. The present invention addresses these and other needs.